The Supreme Court is an unnecessary attack on the constitution

The new Supreme Court is an ill-thought out amendment to a system that served
Britain well for centuries

Yesterday, the justices comprising this country's first Supreme Court were sworn in at their headquarters in Westminster. The new court has replaced the Law Lords as the final court of appeal for most cases in the UK. By any measure, this was a historic event: the House of Lords has exercised the delegated judicial authority of the Crown since Parliament – the High Court of Parliament, indeed – first came into existence in the 13th century.

The change was proposed to end what the Government considered an anomaly, whereby senior members of the judiciary also sat in the legislature. But this was not an anomaly in our own realm, only when compared with other jurisdictions. There are many aspects of the British constitution that have evolved over the centuries that could be considered anomalous, and many more that are old-fashioned. The only worthwhile test to be applied is whether or not they work. Yet, as Lord Neuberger, the new Master of the Rolls, put it, this significant constitutional change occurred "as a result of what appears to have been a last-minute decision over a glass of whisky".

What was the pressing need to dispense with the Law Lords? There was no obvious failure in the system that justified what has turned into a very expensive "modernisation", with nearly £60 million spent adapting the Middlesex Guildhall to the requirements of the court. And there are deeper concerns about this reform, which go to the heart of Labour's disdain for our country's constitution and its determination to wreck as much as it can before leaving office. The interweaving of executive, legislature and judiciary has been central to Britain's political development. We do not have a strict separation of powers as in America, but rather a concept of "mutual independence". The Government argued that there must be a separation in order to comply with Article Six of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees a fair trial. But the Law Lords dealt exclusively with points of law, and it was to the betterment of justice that they were also members of the legislature.

The vaunted independence of the new Supreme Court is not of itself enough to justify its existence. The danger is that it will take a far more pivotal – and politically "progressive" – role in deciding our laws, encouraged to do so by the Human Rights Act and the weakness of the House of Commons. A Supreme Court is likely to be emboldened to go much further than its predecessor in making rulings beyond what Parliament intended. The Law Lords were woven into the warp and weft of our constitutional settlement. We are unpicking it at our peril.